Archive for the ‘malls’ tag

By the time this October 17, 1965, photo of the Latham Circle Mall, which we got from Jim and Chester’s Garage, was snapped, the mall had already been open for several years and was another several years from being converted into an indoor mall. Then again, it appeared to be a sunny Sunday afternoon, a good day to load up the family in the station wagon and try to avoid the oil stains in the parking spots. What do you see here?

It’s that time of year again. Mall time. The pushing, the shoving, the crass displays of commercial greed. But we can be thankful for one thing, at least – that malls have been around long enough to provide us with some great carspotting photos decades down the road. Speaking of which, maybe take the camera along when you get dragged to the mall this holiday season and snap a few parking lot pictures for posterity’s sake and for us to linger over sometime in the 2040s or 2050s. Anyway, this photo of the Willow Lawn Shopping Mall in Richmond, Virginia, comes to us from Vintage Richmond. What do you see here?

At three floors and with up to 200 stores, Cinderella City in Englewood, Colorado, claimed the title of largest enclosed shopping mall west of the Mississippi during its heyday, which was right about when some unknown photographer took this photo that we spotted on the Denver Public Library’s Digital Collections. Best we can tell, the exact location is right about where Inca Street now cuts through the area after the mall was torn down in the late 1990s. What do you see here?

Long before Wal-Mart came up with the idea of combining a department store and a grocery store, J.M. Fields pioneered the concept up and down the East Coast, including Tampa, Florida, where this photo of a J.M. Fields store was taken in 1958. The location is now (or perhaps was) the Floriland Mall, right off I-275. What do you see here? And does this mean in 50 years we’ll be posting photos of modern-day Wal-Mart parking lots to our carspotting series?

When it opened in October 1956, Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota, became the country’s first all-enclosed shopping mall and was originally intended to serve as a community hub with more than just places to shop. It was rather big, too, which all means, of course, it was perfect for parking lot scenes like these two we came across while trawling about the web. What do you see here?